Negro Poets and Their Poems. Robert Thomas Kerlin
CHAPTER II
THE PRESENT RENAISSANCE OF THE NEGRO
I. A Glance at the Field
Many are the forms of expression that the life of a developing people or group finds for itself—business and wealth, education and culture, political and social unrest and agitation, literature and art. It can scarcely happen that any people or group has a vital significance for other peoples or groups, or any real potency, until it begins to express itself in poetry. When, however, a race or a portion of our common race begins to embody its aspirations, its grievances, its animating spirit in song the world may well take notice. That race or portion of our common race has within it an unreckoned potency of good and evil—evil if the good be thwarted.
It is not, then, to editorials and speeches and sermons, nor to petitions, protests, and resolutions, but to poems that the wise will turn in order to learn the temper and permanent bent of mind of a people. Witness the recent history of Ireland. Her literary renascence preceded her effective political agitation. The political agitation which resulted in her independence was the work of poets. The real life of a people finds its only adequate record in song. All of a people’s history that is permanently or profoundly significant is distilled into poetry.
It is to the unknown poetry of a despised and rejected people that I call attention in these pages. One of this people’s poets sings:
We have fashioned laughter
Out of tears and pain,
But the moment after—
Pain and tears again.
Charles Bertram Johnson.
And when he so sings we know there is one race above all others which these words describe. Another sings:
I will suppose that fate is just,
I will suppose that grief is wise,
And I will tread what path I must
To enter Paradise.
Joseph S. Cotter, Sr.
And when he so sings we know out of what tribulations his resignation has been born. The resolution of despair cries out in the lines of another:
My life were lost if I should keep
A hope-forlorn and gloomy face,
And brood upon my ills, and weep,
And mourn the travail of my race.
Leslie Pinckney Hill.
Another singer, coming out of the Black Belt of the lower South, records the daily and life-long history of his people in these lines:
IT’S ALL THROUGH LIFE
A day of joy, a week of pain,
A sunny day, a week of rain;
A day of peace, a year of strife;
But cling to Him, it’s all through life.
An hour of joy, a day of fears,
An hour of smiles, a day of tears;
An hour of gain, a day of strife,
Press on, press on, it’s all through life.
Waverley Turner Carmichael.
In the poetry which the Negro is producing to-day there is a challenge to the world. His race has been deeply stirred by recent events; its reaction has been mighty. The challenge, spoken by one, but for the race, the inarticulate millions as well as the cultured few, comes thus:
TO AMERICA
How would you have us—as we are,
Or sinking ’neath the load we bear?
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or gazing empty at despair? Rising or falling? Men or things? With dragging pace, or footsteps fleet? Strong, willing sinews in your wings? Or tightening chains about your feet? James Weldon Johnson.
With slight regard for smooth words another declares his grievances, that all may understand:
Yes, I am lynched. Is it that I
Must without judge or jury die?
Though innocent, am I accursed
To quench the mob’s blood-thirsty thirst?
Yes, I am mocked. Pray tell me why!
Did not my brothers freely die
For you, and your Democracy—
That each and all alike be free?
Raymond Garfield Dandridge.
So runs the dominant note of this poetry. But it would be unjust to the race producing it to convey the idea that this is the only note. The harp of Ethiopia has many strings and the brothers of Memnon are many. Sometimes the note is one of simple beauty, like that of a wild rose blossoming by the wayside. No reader could tell what race produced such a lyric as the one following, but any reader responsive to the beauty of art and to the truth of passion would assert its excellence:
I will hide my soul and its mighty love
In the bosom of this rose,
And its dispensing breath will take
My love wherever it goes. And perhaps she’ll pluck this very rose, And, quick as blushes start, Will breathe my hidden secret in Her unsuspecting heart. George Marion McClellan.
In a Negro magazine one may chance upon a sonnet that the best poet of our times might have signed and feared no loss to his reputation, nor would there be any mark of race in its lines. To candid judgment I submit the following, from Mrs. Alice Dunbar-Nelson:
VIOLETS
I had not thought of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thoughts of violets meant florists’ shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops,
And cabarets and songs, and deadening wine.
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that God has made—
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams
And now unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.
It needs not that a poet write an epic to prove himself chosen of the muse. The winds of time may blow into oblivion all but five lines of an opus magnum, in which five lines alone was the laborious author a poet. Wise is the poet who writes but the five lines, as here:
SUNSET
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